Python and Pie!

Stephen Brennan • 22 August 2015

Every year at the end of freshman orientation, incoming CWRU students get to
attend a “Saturday College” (SatCo) of their choice. They are opportunities to
learn something new and exciting before getting into the daily grind of “real
classes”. Student organizations have historically led their own SatCos to
advertise themselves to the incoming freshmen. Today, Hacker’s Society led our
very own SatCo, Python and Pie!

Andrew Mason and I co-taught a sparse (but
experienced) group of freshmen the basics of Python, and moved on to showing
them one cool use of Python: writing a Twitter bot! We even moved on and
discussed how Python can be used to do web scraping and efficiently compute
factorials. All of this as we shared 16 delicious pies provided generously by
Hacker’s Society!

If you missed it, you can see the code for my example Twitter bot,
@pyswizzle, at
github (complete with a brief
tutorial). Its depressing existence consists of waiting to be tweeted at, and
once it has been, replying back with a randomly chosen Taylor Swift lyric. You
can also see the module I wrote to download all of Taylor Swift’s (or any other
artist’s) lyrics here. It’s also
available on PyPI – just run pip
install tswift!

Update: The bot has been renamed to @pyswizzle on Twitter (the link is
updated in the body of the article). There is also a
new version of the code on GitHub,
but the old version (still in the body of the article) is still available,
complete with the original tutorial.